Hey everyone! Just thought I would let you all know I have recently updated my RIG. Things are going well as I have replaced my power supply from a 750w BeQuiet! to a 1600W EVGA Supernova G2. I have also added another 2 graphics cards, giving me 3 x R9 290x in total! One of which is water-cooled the other 2 are a reference design, however I have ordered the brackets to allow for closed loop cooling on these as well.

With the addition of graphics cards came the addition of heat which i have helped try and solve by upgrading to a larger case with more airflow. I have gone from my Corsair Carbide 300r to a nice big CoolerMaster Haf X, with 3 x 200mm fans, 1 on the front, 1 at the top and 1 at the side. CPU water cooler mounted to read in a push pull configuration, water-cooled GPU is 'mounted' in the front, the radiator is in a pull configuration currently sat in the hard drive bay, this gets air from the front 200mm fan and is dragged through the rad my NZXTs 140mm fan.

I had one more upgrade which was more of an aesthetic more than anything, but i finally purchased a third Asus 247H Monitor to go in the middle as my AOC did not match in any way, via performance or bezel colour, so yeah, at least thats sorted!

I have also got another PC which i will be using as a rendering machine to save me requiring my main rig on all the time. This is a 6 core 12 thread Xeon X5670 on an LGA 1366 socket, with 48gb of ram and currently a GTX 760. Hopefully this will be used to record to whilst i am streaming and can be left on uploading the youtube whilst i sleep and or get on with other things.

Anyways, thanks for reading and I will try to update more and more! Cyaa!

Hi guys and girls, here is just a quick update for you. I have started making some gameplay videos, these are generally linked straight from my livesteam unless I get some time then I may try and edit them.

I am currently trying to figure out some settings to get streams to be smooth but to also record locally for the ability to edit later if i want too. Having some difficulty with this as can be seen in my most recent rocket league gameplay video.

Hopefully this will all be sorted within the next few weeks however I am quite busy with doing a loft conversion and some other household/personal things.

So so so sorry for the lack of content, been super busy with work and general life things. On the plus side though things are going well, recently purchased a new car only downside is struggling to sell my old one. An update from the GPU upgrade, checking the hardware ID it turns out the card may only be a 290 rather than a 290x however upon further research my card seems to be able to have the firmware/flash upgraded to turn it into a 290x! Another project for another day I feel.

1 project I finally half got a result from was a couple years back I noticed it on HACKADAY that a guy happened to figure out that an ipad 3 screen could be used as an external monitor using display port. I wont go into too many details but I thought it was a pretty cool idea to have such a high resolution display so bought the LCD then ended up getting busy again, this month I bought a purpose made adapter from ABUSEMARK and 4 days later it arrived, plugged the LCD in, plugged power in, and what do you know, worked 100% straight away.

I did purchase 2 of these adapters as I now intend on potentially turning one into an LCD projector, could be a bit more difficult than I first thought looking at the LCD itself, but providing I can peel the backlight off and just have the pure LCD itself, create a house or ask a friend to 3D print me one (got to love nerdy friends :D ) try and get a hold of an old overhead projector, I may end up with a higher than HD Projector. The only downside would be needing something with display port out but a small form factor PC with a single slot card will be able to handle that!

I did write a massive post on how I came to get the R9 290X but my work machine BSOD whilst doing so and I dont have time on lunch any more to rewrite it. I shall give a summary.

I purchased the R9 290X 4gb version second hand for £150. It came with an NZXT G10 cooler bracked + a Kraken X31. Tried the card in the sellers PC and it crashed during any slightly intensive task. Even the screensaver killed it. Tried it in my machine and the same issue. Guy offered me a full refund if the card was faulty.

Took the card home to test, card worked fine (lots of fans pointed at it) and had an average temp of 65C Idle which crept up to 75C and 80C whilst attempting to trouble shoot. My next test was to see if the pump was working.

Unplugged the card and just plugged in the pump and a fan into the appropriate fan headers. I already had NZXT Cam installed on my PC so plugged the pump into USB. Using the cam software I found the pump was at 0RPM however the fans could be controlled fine.

I told this information to the guy and he decided to give me another graphics card as well as the r9 290x! A KFA2 670 EX OC 2gb. Said I could sell it to cover the cost of a new pump.

So now I have a nice GPU to sell and have since purchased a Kraken X41 which JUST fits inside my corsair 300R case in between the lower HDD cage and the upper drive bay. By just I mean it scrapes down both sides with a tight fit.

The benifit of this is that my GPU is no longer an 80C Air cooled at full load causing case temps to increase but also because of my CPU AIO (Antec Kuhler) the higher case temps also increased my CPU temps as it is sat as an exhaust cooler.

CPU temps are down 10C from the GPU swap and GPU temps at full load dont go above 70C with a very hot ambient and powering 3 screens at 5760x1080!